Noah and the Boat with One Door

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Full script

There is a man on a hillside, a long way from the sea, banging a nail into a very large piece of wood.

He has been doing it for a very long time. His beard has more grey in it than it had when he started. There are three young men working beside him, and they are, to be honest, getting rather good at it. And below them, on the road, a small group of neighbours has stopped to look, in the particular way that people look at something they think is a mistake.

One of the neighbours calls up, in a friendly sort of voice, "Noah! It's a lovely boat! What is it for?"

And Noah, who has been asked this one hundred times, puts down his hammer, wipes his forehead, and says, "Rain."

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is of Noah, from the book of Genesis, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and which is told here the way the book tells it. A few of the small conversations, and a good deal of the weather, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

First, a word about the man himself, because he is easy to forget behind the boat.

Noah is one of the very oldest people in the Bible that we hear about, and one of the shortest on description. We are not told what he looked like. We are not told what he sounded like. We are not told whether he was cheerful or grumpy, or whether he whistled while he worked, though I have my suspicions. The book of Genesis gives us very little, and what it gives us fits into one line, and it is a line worth hearing slowly.

It says that Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, and that Noah walked with God.

That is all. Not that he was clever, or strong, or rich, or famous. That he walked with God. The way you might walk with a friend, without needing to talk all the time, and without being surprised when the friend turns up beside you. Of all the praise that has ever been written about anyone, I think that might be the best.

The rest of us are told a little about his family. He had a wife, whom the book does not name, which I find a pity, because I am sure she was remarkable. He had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and each of the sons had a wife, also unnamed. That is eight people altogether, and for the rest of tonight, they are our whole cast, along with the animals, who are a very large supporting company.

Now let me set the scene.

The book tells us that the world, in Noah's day, had gone wrong. Not a little wrong, like a picture hanging crooked, but all the way wrong, in the way that things go when everyone is looking out for themselves and nobody is looking out for anybody else. The old text says the earth was filled with violence. It says that God looked at what the people had made of the world he gave them, and was grieved.

I want to say something about that word, grieved, because it is a gentle word, and it matters for the whole story. The Scripture does not say God was furious. It does not say he was bored, or fed up, or looking for an excuse. It says he was grieved, in his heart. The way a parent is grieved. And everything that happens next has to be heard in that voice, the voice of someone who made something good, and is sad to see it broken.

So God spoke to Noah. And what he said was, in plain language: I am going to end this, and I am going to begin again, and I want you to help me.

Think about that for a moment. The Almighty could have done the whole thing himself in an instant. He did not. He asked a man to build a boat. I think there is something in that for all of us, on a day when we feel too small to be useful. God often asks small people to do the practical part.

And then he gave Noah the instructions, and the instructions are, I am delighted to say, very precise. Genesis is a book that loves a measurement.

The boat was to be made of gopher wood, which nobody has ever been able to identify, so if someone tells you they know what it was, you may politely smile. It was to have rooms in it, and it was to be covered with pitch, which is a sort of black tar, inside and out, so that it would not leak. It was to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. A cubit was roughly the length of your forearm, from your elbow to your fingertips. So, if you stand in a field and pace out something that is about a hundred and fifty metres long, which is a decent stretch, longer than a football pitch and a half, and about as high as a four-storey house, you have the right idea.

It was to have three decks, a roof, a window up near the top, and one door, in the side. Remember the door. We will come back to the door.

And it was not, I want to be clear, a boat in the sense we usually mean. It had no mast, no oars, and no rudder. The text does not mention a single way of steering it. It was a sort of enormous floating box. That is the word the Hebrew uses, the same word, as it happens, that is used for the little basket in which baby Moses was later floated down the river. A box that is trusted to God. The steering, I think we are meant to understand, would be done by somebody else.

The first scene of the story, then, is a long one, and it is the one that most tellings leave out. It is the building.

Because here is a thing to think about. A boat that size, with only a few helpers, does not go up in a weekend. The Bible does not say precisely how long the building took, and later writers have guessed at all sorts of numbers, and we will not guess along with them. We will only say that it took a long time. Years, at the very least. Long enough for the three sons to marry. Long enough for the neighbours to lose interest in the joke, find it again, and lose it again.

Let me try to give you a small picture of an ordinary week.

Early in the morning, the sons go to the forest. They are looking for good timber, and in those days that meant long walks, and felling trees with bronze tools and plenty of patience, and dragging them home on sledges pulled by oxen, who had views about it. By midday there are great heaps of planks in the yard, and the smell of cut wood is everywhere. In the afternoon, there is sawing, and fitting, and the thump of the mallet. In the evening, the women bring out bread, and olives, and a stew with rather a lot of lentils in it, because it is a household that has learned to be thrifty. And the pitch has to be boiled in a great cauldron, and spread by hand, and the whole place smells of tar for weeks, and everyone's clothes are ruined. That, I think, is the part you do not see in the picture books.

And the neighbours drift by.

I am not going to tell you the neighbours were wicked, one by one. Some of them, I expect, were quite pleasant. They would stop on their way to the market, and lean on the fence, and say things like, "Well, Noah, it's coming along," and "It's very big, isn't it?" and "Have you thought about a lake?" And Noah, who was not a man for speeches, would say, "I have been told to do it," and go on hammering.

There is an old Christian tradition, and a New Testament letter that says it, that Noah was also a preacher of righteousness. The Second Letter of Peter calls him exactly that. It does not tell us the words. But I imagine them as small and steady, said over a fence, between nails. "It would be a good idea to be kinder to each other." "There is going to be a change." "There is room in the boat, if you would like to come." Nobody came. That is the sad part of the story, and the book says it as plainly as it says everything. It is a hard thing, to tell people something true, for years, and watch them smile and walk on. Noah did it, anyway, and that is why we call him righteous.

The day came, in the end, as the days do. The boat was finished. The last of the pitch had dried. The door was hung. And Noah, who was by now six hundred years old, which in that age of the world is not nearly so remarkable as it sounds to us, stood in the yard and looked at the thing he had made, and very likely felt the usual mixture of pride, and fear, and a strong wish to sit down.

And God said to him, "Come into the boat, you and all your household."

There is a lovely detail in the way the Scripture tells it. It does not say "go into the boat." It says "come." Come into the boat. As if God were already inside, holding the door.

And then came the animals.

I want to take my time over this part, because it is the part that children like best, and rightly.

The book tells us that two of every kind came to Noah, a male and a female, of everything that creeps on the ground, and every bird, and every beast. And it tells us something that is easy to miss: of the animals that were counted clean, there were to be seven pairs, because, as we learn at the end of the story, there would be sacrifices to offer, and a man needs something to offer. Of the others, there was one pair.

The text does not say Noah went out and rounded them up. It says they came to him. And I am glad, because I have tried to herd one goat, and I would not have wanted to try it with a giraffe.

Imagine the scene in the yard. It is a still, golden morning. There is a long, soft, rustling, shuffling line of creatures coming over the hill. The birds come first, because they are easiest, in great swirling flocks, settling on the roof like leaves. Then the small things, the mice, the hedgehogs, the beetles, the lizards, all tumbling over each other. Then the sheep, and the goats, and the cattle. Then the heavier animals, and the strange ones, the ones nobody in the yard has ever seen before, with long necks, or long noses, or no particular sense of direction. And through it all walks Noah's family, directing them, politely, up the ramp.

I would like to tell you that it was calm. I think it was mostly calm. There is an old idea, and I am happy to borrow it, that animals know more than we think about when to be somewhere. But I suspect there was also, at some point, a goat on the roof.

One of Noah's sons, I imagine, is at the door with a tally stick. "Two lions. Two lambs. Two lions. Wait. Why are there two lions?" And his father says, patiently, "They will be fine. It is a very large boat." "Father, they are standing next to the lambs." "They will be fine," says Noah, in a voice that has learned a great deal about trust over the previous few years. And they are fine. I think that is one of the most beautiful things in the whole story. For a year, in a floating box, the lion and the lamb were neighbours. A very long time before the prophet Isaiah wrote about the day when the wolf shall live with the lamb, there was a boat in which they did. And I do not think that was an accident.

When the last animal was aboard, and the last of the supplies, and the family was inside, the book tells us something that always stops me.

It says: and the Lord shut him in.

Not Noah. The Lord.

I find that very moving. The man had built the boat, and loaded it, and done everything he could do, and then, at the end, he could not even close his own door. He had to be shut in, by someone else's hand. And I think we are meant to hear that as the most tender sentence in the whole account. From the moment that door was closed, Noah was no longer in charge of anything. He was only being kept.

Then there was a silence. The book gives us seven days of it, in fact, a week of waiting, between the shutting of the door and the first of the rain. Seven days in which the sky was perfectly clear, and the neighbours were perfectly entitled to laugh, and the family sat inside the dark of the boat, listening to the animals breathe.

And then the rain began.

I will tell you how the book puts it, because it is poetic. It says: on that day, all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. In other words, water from below and water from above, the whole structure of the world's order loosened for a time. It rained, the book says, forty days and forty nights.

I do not want to linger on what happened outside. The Scripture does not linger. It says, plainly and sadly, that the waters rose and prevailed, and that everything that had breath on the dry land died. It is a hard sentence, and we are not going to soften it by pretending it is not there. This is not an episode about the flood as a triumph. It is a story about what God does for a world he has not given up on.

So let us stay with the ones inside.

The boat, as the water rose, lifted. The book says it rose above the earth, and floated on the face of the waters. I would like you to imagine that feeling. For months, it had been solid, a great thing standing in a yard, heavy with its own wood. And now, quietly, it stopped being heavy. The floor moved a little. The beams creaked. Somewhere in the dark, a donkey said, "Oh."

It was not frightening in the way you might expect. The pitch held. The door held. It rocked, a little, the way a cradle does. And I think that, once the first night was past, the family began to learn a kind of rhythm, because there was a great deal to do.

Consider the work. Eight people, and a boat full of animals, and a year of looking after them. There was feeding, twice a day, at the very least. There was water to carry, and straw to change, and a long and not-very-glamorous business with shovels that I will not describe, because it is bedtime. There was the quiet, steady, unglamorous labour of keeping a great many creatures alive, which is, if you think about it, the work of almost every parent and every farmer and every nurse who has ever lived.

And Noah, in the middle of it, was very likely too busy to be afraid. That is another thing I love about this story. We tend to imagine the great saints standing at the rail, looking at the sky, with beautiful thoughts. I think Noah spent a good deal of the flood with a bucket.

At night, I imagine, they sat together in the dim, with a small lamp, and the sound of the rain on the roof, and ate bread and dried figs, and said the prayers they knew. Noah would have said them in the old way, the way his fathers did, going back through his grandfather Methuselah, who lived longer than anyone, to Enoch, who walked with God and was not found, because God took him. It was a family that knew how to walk with God, and that is, in the end, what the boat was carrying.

Now, the book of Genesis has a way of passing quickly over the weeks. It says the waters prevailed upon the earth for a hundred and fifty days. A hundred and fifty days, in the dark, on the water, with nothing but the creak of the beams. And then, in a sentence I could read over and over, it says:

But God remembered Noah.

That is how the turning point comes. Not with a trumpet. With a verb. God remembered Noah, and all the beasts, and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.

Remembered, in the Bible, does not mean that God had forgotten, and then suddenly thought, "Oh yes." It means something more like turned his face towards. It is the same word that is used when God remembers Hannah, and when he remembers the covenant. When God remembers, things start to happen. And so the fountains of the deep were stopped, and the windows of heaven were closed, and the rain was held back, and the waters began, slowly, to go down.

It took a long time. The book is very particular about this. For another stretch, the waters continued to recede. And then, on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.

I would like you to notice that. Not on the mountain. On the mountains. Ararat is the name of a region, in the old language, and not a single peak, and the text is careful about it. Later people have gone looking for the remains of a boat on a particular mountain, and I will not tell you whether they found one. I will only tell you that the book does not say, and I think it is quite happy for us not to know.

What matters for us is the thump. A gentle one, I expect. The boat, which had been moving for months, stopped moving. And in the dark, the family and the animals all felt it, all together, a sort of shiver through the wood, and then a great and wonderful stillness.

"We've stopped," said one of the sons.

"We've stopped," agreed another.

"Does that mean we can go out?" asked the third.

And Noah said, because he was a careful man, "Not yet."

This is the part of the story that I find the most interesting, because it is the part that is about patience, and I am very bad at patience.

You might think that when a boat comes to rest, everyone leaps out and kisses the ground. They did not. The tops of the mountains were not seen until the tenth month. That is another long wait. And then, after a further forty days, Noah opened the window, and sent out a bird.

The first bird was a raven. Now, a raven is a clever and a rather independent bird, and it did not come back, in the sense of coming home. The book says it went to and fro until the waters had dried up from the earth. It flew out, and it flew about, and it perched on whatever it could find, and it was clearly not in a hurry to return. That is, I suppose, the nature of ravens. They are the sort of bird who will not tell you whether it is nice outside.

So Noah, who still wanted an answer, sent out a second bird. A dove. This is the one that has gone down in the memory of the world.

The dove flew out, and the book says it found no place to set its foot, because the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. And so it came back to him in the ark. And Noah put out his hand, and took her, and brought her in.

I want you to see that gesture, because I think it is one of the loveliest in the Bible. A tired old man, leaning out of a window in a boat, with his arm stretched out, and a small, damp, tired bird landing on his hand. He does not scold her. He does not say, "Well, that was no help." He takes her in, and holds her.

And he waited another seven days. And he sent her out again.

This time, in the evening, the dove came back. And in her beak, says the book, was a freshly plucked olive leaf.

Let us stay with that for a moment. Slow down. Breathe.

A freshly plucked olive leaf. Not a branch, not a tree, not an olive grove. A single leaf. Small, and green, and a little bit silver on the underside. It is just about the least dramatic proof that a story has ever offered. And yet Noah knew. He looked at it, and he knew, because an olive tree does not grow under the sea. Somewhere out there, a tree had come up out of the water, and had put out a leaf, and the world had started to be a world again.

One leaf was enough.

Let that be the thing you carry into sleep tonight, if you carry anything. You do not need the whole orchard. You do not need the whole answer. You need, now and then, just one small green sign, brought home in the evening by something small that did its best. It is quite enough to be going on with.

And Noah waited another seven days, to be sure. And he sent the dove out a third time. And this time she did not come back.

That was how he knew.

Even then he did not rush. Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was dry. But still, he did not go out. In the whole of this story, I do not think there is a single moment when Noah goes first. He has been shut in by God, and he waits to be let out by God. And so it was in the second month, on the twenty-seventh day, that God spoke to him, and said:

"Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons, and your sons' wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you, so that they may be fruitful and multiply upon the earth."

So the door, the one door, the one in the side, was opened.

I have thought about that door a good deal. It was the only way in, and it was the only way out. The family went in through it, and in a way, the whole of the human race, which had narrowed down to eight people, went in through it, and the whole world's hope went with them. And then, after a year and ten days, the door opened, and the light came in.

What did they see?

I think we may say that the first thing they saw was the colour green. After a year of brown wood and grey rain and the dark, there was green. And the second thing they saw was sky, wide, endless and washed, with air that smelled of wet earth. And the third thing, I expect, was a goat, who had been the first one to the door.

And out they came. The birds first, in a great cloud, up into the open sky. Then the animals, according to their kinds, pouring down the ramp in the sun. The lions, I am glad to say, went one way. The lambs went another. And the family walked out last, blinking, with their hands over their eyes, onto the ground.

Noah, as he stepped onto it, did not say a word. The Bible, which is usually generous with speeches, gives him not a single line. What it gives him is a deed. The first thing he did, on the first day, was to build an altar. Not a house. Not a vineyard, yet. An altar, to the Lord. And on it, he offered some of the clean animals, the ones he had brought seven by seven, for exactly this purpose. The book says the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, and said in his heart that he would never again curse the ground because of man, though the inclination of man's heart is evil from his youth.

Listen to what God says there. He says it because of how people are, not in spite of it. He has seen the worst of us, and he knows what we are like, and his answer is not to give up on us. His answer is a promise.

The promise comes in the ninth chapter, and it is the other half of the story, and it is very beautiful.

God blessed Noah and his sons, and told them the same words he said at the very beginning, to Adam and Eve in the garden: be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. A beginning again. A second morning of the world.

And then he made a covenant. The word covenant, in the Bible, is a kind of solemn friendship, a promise sworn between two sides. And this one is remarkable, because God makes it not just with Noah and his family, but with every living creature that came out of the ark: the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth. It is a promise to the dog. It is a promise to the goat. It is a promise, my children, to the beetle in the corner.

And what is the promise? Plainly: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.

And then, because a promise ought to have a sign, as a wedding has a ring, God gives one. He says: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.

His bow. The word the Bible uses is the word for a warrior's bow, the sort of weapon you hang up when the fighting is done. I like that very much. God, in the story, takes the bow he might have used, and hangs it in the sky, pointing away from us, in seven colours. And whenever clouds gather, and the rain falls, and we feel, as people always have, a small chill of worry, there it is, bending over the fields: the sign that God remembers.

I have been told that the best way to see a rainbow is to stand with your back to the sun and look at the rain. In other words, you have to be standing in the light, and looking at the weather. That is not a bad way to live.

Now, before we slow down for the night, I want to say a quick word about something the story does not tell, because I think it is only honest to say that the Scripture goes on, and Noah's story goes on, and not all of it is for bedtime.

Genesis tells us that Noah planted a vineyard, and that something happened in his tent, and that it caused a great deal of family trouble. It is part of the book, and the Church has always read it, and it is part of what the Scripture teaches us about how even righteous people are only people. But it is not a story for the end of a long day, and it would take us far from the rainbow, so we will leave it for another night, and for another telling, and for a morning with plenty of time.

Let us finish where the best part is.

There is a way the Church has always heard this story, and I would like to tell you about it, because it is a good way to hear it, and it has given the boat a second name.

From the earliest centuries, Christians noticed something about the boat with one door. They noticed that a few people had been carried through the water, and kept safe, in a vessel that God himself had provided. And the First Letter of Peter says that in the ark a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water, and that this corresponds to baptism, which now saves us. So the Church has taught for nearly two thousand years that the ark is a picture of the Church herself, a great, creaky, crowded, not always elegant vessel, full of all sorts of creatures, who would not ordinarily choose each other as neighbours, held up on the water by a mercy that is not their own. And there is one door.

I do not say that to be solemn. I say it because I like it. The Church, to this day, is a boat that smells, in places, of animals. And it has not sunk.

And the Letter to the Hebrews adds one small thing, which I find gentle and good. It says that by faith Noah, being warned by God about events as yet unseen, took heed and constructed an ark. By faith. Not by certainty. Not by knowing how it would turn out. By taking God at his word, and starting to saw.

That, I think, is what the whole story asks of us on an ordinary Tuesday. Not that we build something enormous. Only that we do the next plank, and trust the one who asked.

The light is very low now. Let me tell you how the evening goes, on the hillside, after the great day when the door was opened.

The animals have spread out across the green, and the birds are in the trees, singing, a little out of tune, because they have been out of practice for a year. The family has built a fire, and it smells of cedar. Noah is sitting a little apart on a rock, with a small and slightly crushed olive leaf in his hand. He has kept it. He cannot quite say why.

The sun is going down in the west, behind the wet hills, and it has rained again, just a little, a short, soft, pattering shower, the first ordinary rain of the new world. His youngest son comes and sits beside him. Neither of them says much.

And then, over the far field, the light changes. There is a curve of colour in the grey. Red, and gold, and green, and blue. Very faint at first, and then clearer, rising from the ground, and arching over the whole of the sky from one edge to the other.

"Father," says the son, very quietly. "Look."

And Noah looks, and doesn't say anything at all. He puts his hand on his son's shoulder. And the bow goes on shining, over the sleeping animals, over the wet green fields, over a very small family, and a very large boat on a hill, and the whole new, quiet, forgiven world.

You can put your own day down now. Whatever was heavy in it, whatever was unfinished, whatever you were afraid of, let it settle, the way the water settled. It is going down. It does go down. And there is a small, green, silver-backed leaf waiting somewhere for you, tomorrow, brought home by something small.

Breathe in, slowly. And out.

The door is shut, and you are not the one who has to hold it. Someone else has done that. The rain on the roof is a lullaby. The beams are creaking, and the whole boat is rocking, very gently, like a cradle. And there is a rainbow coming, in the morning, over the hills.

Now, notes for the curious, which we do at the end of every episode, so that you know what you have just been told.

What is Scripture is nearly all of it. The call of Noah, the instructions for the ark, the animals, the shutting of the door, the forty days of rain, the hundred and fifty days of the waters, the resting of the ark on the mountains of Ararat, the raven, the dove, the olive leaf, the altar, the covenant and the bow in the cloud are all in the book of Genesis, chapters six to nine. The measurements are in the text. The two Testaments remember him: the Letter to the Hebrews says he built the ark by faith, the First Letter of Peter sees baptism in the water, and Jesus himself speaks of the days of Noah.

What the Scripture does not say, and what we have not pretended it says, is the name of Noah's wife, how long the building took, what the animals ate, which mountain the boat stopped on, or what was said between the family in the dark. Later storytellers, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, have filled in many of those gaps, and some of their stories are wonderful, but we have kept them out of the telling.

What this episode made up is the colour: the neighbours at the fence, the goat on the roof, the lion and the tally stick, the conversations on the boat, and the last scene on the hillside with the rainbow. None of those are in the Bible. None of them change what happens, or what it means.

One more honest note. People have argued for a very long time about how this story relates to geology, and to the other flood stories of the ancient world, of which there are several. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions both hold that Genesis is inspired, and that it teaches something true about God, about human sin, and about God's mercy. We have told it the way it is told, and we have left the arguments to people with better tools than a bedtime voice.

Noah is honoured by both the Catholic and the Orthodox traditions. The Orthodox Church remembers him among the Forefathers of Christ in the weeks before Christmas. In the Catholic Church, the covenant with Noah and the rainbow are read on the first Sunday of Lent in the year of Mark. He has no single feast day that every church keeps.

That's the story of Noah for tonight. The Church remembers him among the righteous of the Old Testament, in the weeks before Christmas in the Orthodox tradition, and in the first week of Lent in the Catholic. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the Lord, who shut the door on a stormy night and opened it on a green morning, who hung up his bow in the clouds and remembers every living creature, keep you tonight, and bring you through the waters, and give you rest. Goodnight, and God bless.

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